Remember when Vanessa Redgrave sang ?The Lusty Month of May? in the movie version of Camelot? She was heartbreakingly young then, and surprisingly callow, oblivious to the vast promise inside her, preparing soon to reveal itself. This song has everything to do with SOLUNA, the fantastic festival of music and arts coming to a city near you for 21 days this May, courtesy of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. That city, of course, is Dallas, which finds its essential distillation in the Dallas Arts District, where video artists, performing artists, photographers, musicians, painters, and sculptors will hold forth in a grand cacophony of social commentary, celebrating spring as if it were indeed in Camelot, but not ignoring the shadow within and without that threatens always the sunshine of our lives. Guinevere, after all, wound up in a nunnery for the love of Lancelot. King Arthur, her husband, was not amused by any of it.
Anna-Sophia van Zweden is the impresario of all this edgy reverie that recalls more than once the glory days of Hollywood in that golden age of the 1940?s and ?50?s when movies relied, often but not always, on writing done with ?a pen of brass,? as Virginia Woolf once said, unkindly, about Vita Sackville-West. But video-and-still photographer Alex Prager and composer-pianist Conrad Tao (both featured in SOLUNA) regard the classic California of mid-century motion pictures with reverence and respect, with yearning, even, for a world they never really knew. Neither did Anna-Sophia van Zweden, but she views with urgent empathy the quest for ?identity, memory, nationality, and religion? implicit in so much of the work now slated for SOLUNA, especially Inferno, a film by Yael Bartana that will be screened as a prelude to Leonard Bernstein?s Kaddish, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, father of Anna-Sophia.
Jaap van Zweden, miraculous music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, started out in Amsterdam as a prodigy of the violin, Anna-Sophia?s instrument insofar as she has had an instrument of her own. She played it when she was three or four but was ?not very successful,? she remembers. Besides, her father was ?too good,? so it was pointless to compete with him. She decided to ?stay away from playing music? and instead chose the path of her mother, an art historian who introduced her daughter to museums and?talked her into coming to Dallas to intern with Charles Wylie when he was curator of the contemporary section at the Dallas Museum of Art. The three boys in the family stayed home in Amsterdam, one working in insurance, another ?obsessed with music,? as his sister said, especially the electronic sound of the?keyboard.
Anna, the oldest, does listen to music, mainly Bach when she?s working. His odes to the orderly mind saw her through the writing of her thesis at the University of Amsterdam on Dutch and American museums, their differences and cultural dilemmas. She also likes Mozart, another apostle of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and Wagner, who certainly isn?t. Wagner was the 19th Century precursor to Freud and the discontents he summoned to the surface of conscious recognition. As for Anna-Sophia, her musical choice at any moment ?depends on my mood,? she said. One could say she?s somewhat like Einstein, who worked on the edge of the universe but turned for solace to Vivaldi. Few can navigate the unimaginable in every aspect of life.
If music for her looks back to earlier inspiration, art is planted firmly in today, in ground that shifts with the seasons but never loses its connection to the earth. When she talks about Destination (America), the theme of SOLUNA, Anna- Sophia turns immediately to Alex Prager, who understands the era of Photoplay and Modern Screen better than any keeper of those archives, suffused as they are with an aura of innocent?promiscuity. She knows the undertow of the Eisenhower years. The heroines of ambiguity in her stills and videos easily could stand in for Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road.
Alex Prager grew up in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, sometime home territory of Casey Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jon Hamm, and, at one point, even Marilyn Monroe, whose detached, unreachable blonde allure looked ahead to that of actress Elizabeth Banks in Face in the Crowd, one of three films by Alex Prager. It will open SOLUNA.
Alex Prager told one interviewer that she ?wanted to be an actress, a singer, a dancer.? Instead she became a troublesome 14-year-old whose parents coped with her acting out by allowing her to go to Switzerland with a girl she had met whose grandmother owned a knife shop in Lucerne. There, Alex sold Swiss Army knives, kitchen knives, hunting knives, and all sorts of other fine cutlery for several months. Then she traveled around Europe, an autodidact of experience, before returning, finally, to L.A.?and finding a way to get her GED. Then she atoned for the premature freedom she had snatched for awhile from life by working in offices, all but drowning in the ?mundane and the washed-over.?
Alex found herself and her own calling at the Getty Museum in the photographs of William Eggleston. That?day ?catapulted me into photography,? she told me on the telephone. In time she had a show of her own stills in London and a producer ?came up to me,? she related to an art publication, ?and said, ?Hey, if you ever want to make a short film, let me know.??
Alex did decide to make a film. It was called Despair with Bryce Dallas Howard, which made it into ?New Photography of 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art.? No more knives.
Alex Prager was on her way, on the cutting edge of nostalgia as a ?safety net? for the age of angst, soothing her viewers with ?a warm air of familiarity? when she wasn?t evoking, as Hollywood sometimes does, a world ?completely tragic and morbid.? All of her scenes she shoots in a studio, even those?on a beach. For Face in the Crowd she used a sound stage, with four sets going at one time for four days, while she pirouetted among them, in constant rotation.
?The thing about Hollywood,? she said, ?is the question, ?Is this person real,? or a character made up for this occasion?? Prager?s characters are definitely made up for the occasion, but the work is real, and brilliant.
Like Alex Prager, Conrad Tao found high school problematic. A prodigy of the piano who started performing?Conrad Tao. Photo by Mark Kitaoka professionally at 12, he pursued his education, to the extent he could, in the Juilliard Pre-College Division, the Professional Children?s School, and, independently, through?the Indiana University High School of Continuing Studies. Conrad excelled at the violin too, but, like Anna-Sophia van Zweden, he ?took early retirement? from that instrument, at 14. Still, he sometimes composes on the violin, or the piano, or he writes his music ?straight onto the computer,? as he?partly did in The World Is Very Different Now, commissioned by the DSO for its concert commemorating John F. Kennedy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination. The piece, also written on piano, was so impressive the Symphony made Conrad Tao its composer-in-residence for 2015?2016.
All this I learned in a bracing phone conversation with one of the most rigorous and wide-ranging minds I have ever encountered. Conrad Tao, now 20, told me he is pursuing art history at Columbia, concurrently with piano at Juilliard. He doesn?t know when he?ll graduate. It doesn?t matter since his mother is on the faculty of Columbia as an atmospheric scientist and thus he has a ?free ride.? He also has ?the luxury of having a job,? traveling three weekends out of every four to perform on the piano, as he will do at SOLUNA. Drenched in praise wherever he plays, Conrad Tao still exudes the enthusiasm of young talent at the very beginning. No jaded pretentions for him. ?Pretentions,? he noted ?is an overused word? in any case.
For SOLUNA, Conrad will play a piece by Miklos Rozsa written for Spellbound, the psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ingrid Bergman as a psychiatrist and Gregory Peck as her patient. Rozsa too began with a violin, at age five in Budapest. He studied composing in Germany, spent time in Paris and London before decamping to Hollywood in 1940, as did so many artists, including Arnold Schoenberg, when the Nazi Holocaust scorched the soul of Europe. SOLUNA will showcase both Rozsa and Schoenberg in Remix: Hollywood Exile, with the world premiere of a new video by Pipilotti Rist, Swiss sensation whose studies of feminine sensuality have been much admired in venues from MOMA to the Venice Biennale.
Kozsa?s soundtrack for Spellbound is ?a little bit kitschy, shamelessly part of that [movie] language,? Conrad admitted, ?but I?m not interested in trying to legitimize things? I don?t like [the idea that] some stuff is more valid than others. [That is] artistically, ethically?suspect.?
Conrad Tao has strong opinions and expresses them with powers of articulation that are hard to refute. Differing somewhat, it seems, from his mother, a scientist, and his father, a telecommunications engineer, he says he is ?suspicious of answers,? because they make you ?susceptible to closing yourself off to other avenues.? He prefers ?spiritual, emotional curiosity.?
Another man of the emotions, or you might say passions, is Francisco Moreno. He has just left a good job at The Warehouse, as a gallery teacher for the Rachofsky and Faulconer Collections, to devote himself fully to his own work in a studio near Fair Park. The first thing I saw when I arrived there was WCD (Washington Crossing the Delaware), the enormous black-and-white painting on two panels he?s?completing for SOLUNA. Powerful, urgent, insistent, like Picasso?s Guernica, it is more a commentary on the modern machine age than on the American general?s attack on Hessian forces, mercenaries really, fighting for the British on Christmas night, 1776.
Francisco?s inspiration for the work came from the 19th Century painting of the same name by Emanual Leutz that hangs in New York?s Metropolitan Museum. When Francisco first saw a print of it, on the Colbert Report, he was so captivated by the drama of the picture that he used a travel grant to go to New York and see it for himself.
To make his own point, apart from Gen. Washington, about immigration, globalization, and the struggle to?survive all that, Francisco is deploying his painting as a backdrop for a car he and his brothers are rebuilding ?from scratch,? using a 1975 Datsun with a Chevy V8 engine, painted jagged black and white, a form of ?dazzle camouflage? sometimes used to disguise battleships. While his older brother, Alex, an engineer at Bell Helicopter, oversees the project, Pablo, the youngest in the family, who owns an auto?mechanic shop in Fort Worth, will propel the action, driving the car in a circle during SOLUNA, ?doughnutting? round and round in front of the picture. All this will happen in an old Dr. Pepper warehouse Erin Cluley, Francisco?s dealer, found for him near his studio. The car will roar, or so it?will seem, thanks to a Mutha Thumpr camshaft, and that sound will be designed to make this performance art gratingenough to be ingrained in memory.
?Identities are complex,? said Francisco Moreno. And no one has given more thought to national identities than Yael Bartana. ?I analyze Israel and Palestine,? she explained by phone from Berlin, where she now lives, ?how structures affect our identity.? ?What structures?? I asked. ?Military is the obvious one,? she answered, but also ?historical narrative? collective memory.? In Israel, where she grew up, that means special attention to memorial days, one for the Holocaust, the other for soldiers who have died since 1948.
Like Alex Prager, Yael first pursued photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. It wasn?t until a time in Toronto, as an exchange student, that she turned to film. Still uncertain though, she took a break from video and a lot more ?classes in many things? in New York, including computer art, but grew disenchanted by ?too much programming.?
So it was back to film and forward to phenomenal success for an artist with a strong sense of drama and a lot to say, as will be clear to those who see Inferno at SOLUNA. This is an astonishing work shot in Sao Paulo and centered on a replica of Solomon?s temple built by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a neo-Pentecostal faith of evangelical persuasion, started in 1977 by a bishop sufficiently driven to?spread his movement to several parts of the world, including the U.S.
?He was creating new Jerusalem outside the territory of Jerusalem,? Yael noted, but ?honestly, the appeal belongs to prosperity theology, in a way a capitalistic kind of notion, the promise of a better life? But it?s all about gaining power in the end.?
As for her own life, Yael Bartana says now it?s based in Berlin, ?because of love.? What better reason? ?I?m trying to make sense of my life in Europe,? she said, which may take some doing, given all that?s happened since her Polish trilogy of films called And Europe Will Be Stunned that caused such a stir at the Venice Biennale four years ago. Europe has been stunned in ways that perhaps even as imaginative a realist as Yael Bartana did not anticipate. ?You have a lot to work with,? I volunteered. ?Yes,? her voice trailed off, ?and living in Germany?is?an inspiration.? On many levels, no doubt.
Europe has been stunned yet again and to the core. It began, the current outrage, on January 7, when 12 people were gunned down in the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Monte Laster, an American artist now working in Paris, was back in Dallas that day, speaking to student s at Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts about his plans with them for SOLUNA. Checking text messages afterwards, he read with shock about the massacre of the cartoonists, one of whom he knew and had seen only?a few weeks before.
Stunned, indeed, he returned to his rough neighborhood in La Courneuve, north of Paris, to find people gripped by ?depression and fear?fear of reprisals.? ?I never agreed with Hebdo,? he said, ?or the cartoonists who were disrespectful to Islam and other things.? But certainly Monte Laster is?a champion of free expression, and so he has been saying on talk shows in France, representing the French-American Creative Exchange (FACE), which he started 15 years ago.
Through FACE he has brought poets from Harlem to Paris and young rappers and journalists from Paris to New York and Washington, where they went to the White House. Of course, on both sides of the Atlantic, they also made art in many dimensions. That?s exactly what Monte Laster has in mind for Destination, in Five Movements, a grand extravaganza he?ll stage for SOLUNA in Klyde Warren Park on Memorial?Day. To the music of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, multiple giant screens will showcase videos by students from Booker T. as well as political refugees and immigrants at the Dallas Museum of Art, drawing, to tell their story, on the work there that has impressed them most, plus images of the?players on stage and the people all around.
You sense that people have always been plentiful for Monte Laster who grew up in Blue Mound, near Fort Worth. He spent some of his teenage years in Los Angeles and tried art in France and Belgium, then landscape gardening in Dallas?s Rosewood Properties, helping with the grounds at the Mansion, before committing fully to Paris and the pursuit of painting and sculpture. He moved to La Courneuve?about as far from the Mansion as he could get?because artists ?don?t have much money and they need a lot of space.? Besides, he added, ?I loved living there.?
But I?ll be ?coming home after all these years,? Monte exulted from a patio in Fez, Morocco, where finally his cell phone worked. ?With this type of project, this kind of homecoming?[I am] so blessed.?
SOLUNA is meant to be a blessing too, a blessing of going home again, or going far afield, a blessing of springtime, made for the senses, an invitation to look, to listen, to see, to hear, to experience, to be enthralled, to open your eyes, to clear your head, to change your mind, and, perhaps, for the first time, to understand. –P